NOTE: This review contains some content that may be considered spoilers, proceed at your own risk!
The much anticipated sophomore film of director Rose Glass, Love Lies Bleeding, is a key player in the ongoing dyke renaissance in popular culture (see also; Bottoms, the lesbian bar renaissance, and, most recently, Billie Eilish’s explicit coming out). Straddling crime thriller, body horror, and U-haul romance, Love Lies Bleeding is inherently attention-grabbing, with a slight nod to the tongue and cheek, highly self-aware of its own absurdity. Drawing heavily on Kristen Stewart’s signature emotional constipation, Glass curates a lustfully violent narrative, sapphically camp and, in doing so, ensures the film joins the ranks of sexy crime lesbians alongside cult classics like Bound and Set It Off.
Initially plotting the budding romance between Jackie (Katy M. O'Brian), a drifter and determined bodybuilder, and Lou (Kristen Stewart), a reclusive 'grade-A dyke', Love Lies Bleeding explodes into a, at times tenuous, narrative of criminal underworlds. Accelerated by Jackie's progressive roid rage and Lou's inability to protect her sister from her abusive husband, it is hard to identify the point at which the plot flips from romance to crime thriller, a factor that may put off some viewers as clunky. However, there is a particular campiness in Glass' execution of this switch that indulges in narrative excess and serves to prepare viewers for the absurdism that descends on its conclusion.
Much of Love Lies Bleeding's appeal lies with its sapphic gaze, both in terms of the attention the film has received from queer women, and within the film itself, as Lou persistently gazes upon Jackie’s increasingly bulging muscles. Here we have a reversal of the trope of the overly masculine, grotesquely queer woman, as the female gaze romanticises Jackie's growing, growing muscles. The eroticism of this growth is particularly apparent in Lou and Jackie's honeymoon montage, where Lou gazes at Jackie in various poses and positions as queer 80s band Gina X plays, ‘I’m your transformer’, offering a commentary on Jackie's transformative potential. Glass pushes the boundaries on what can be done with bodies in cinema, through Jackie's steroid-enhanced bodybuilding, through the unrealistic murder of Lou's brother, whose death is overwrought and excessive. This could be read as unnecessary, detracting from the seriousness of the narrative but through engaging with the queer and camp, Love Lies Bleeding offers a reparative approach to depictions of queer women, that does not pathologise or fetishise them whilst still also enabling the queer body to be desirable and transformed.
Desire is central to Love Lies Bleeding, shown most explicitly through Lou's film-long journey to quit smoking, providing fleeting comic relief through the onslaught of dramatics as the film progresses. There is something endlessly sexy about lovers so intertwined that they will commit heinous acts of vengeance for one other (see: all sapphics who had sexual awakenings to Bound or The Handmaiden), and Loves Lies Bleeding is no different in its appeal to this specific theme of queer desire. Revenge is aimed at patriarchal figures, husbands and fathers, and it feels particularly prescient that such revenge is carried out by a queer, female couple. However, as the couple escape into the sunset, it doesn’t necessarily feel like a Thelma & Louise liberation, but rather, with Daisy dying in the back of the truck, with Lou returning to cigarettes, there is a sense of muckier reality at play, that vengeance is insufficient. This unsatisfying resolution feels slightly at odds with a film that is ostensible about revenge and certainly limits the lasting impact of the narrative.
What is undoubtedly appealing to queer audiences on the first watch of Love Lies Bleeding is its refusal to provide coming-out narratives for either of its queer protagonists. As Stewart noted in the promotion of the film, ‘gays do a whole lot of stuff, other than coming out’, and this concisely summarises the particular excitement that surrounds this film - rarely do we get narratives of queerness that do not feature gay revelations, and, whilst the plot is fanciful and strange, far from reality, what it does offer in terms of representation is the depiction of queer women existing, queerly, their coming out irrelevant to their current lives. The dearth of representation in this area, particularly for well-funded Hollywood cinema, will undoubtedly mean Love Lies Bleeding will become a queer classic, and its criminal underworld tone will keep in it the books as a well-remembered example of the lesbian crime thriller.
A24
edited by Charlotte Lewis
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